After the initial public endorsement of recycling products such as glass and the like as part of environmental concerns, interest in saving small size glass products such as bottles and jars has declined because of the difficulty in transporting glass to recycling plants. One particular difficulty is that glass such as plate glass and laminated glass is dangerous to handle and is not easily transported in large quantities. In addition, the economics of transporting large quantities of empty glass bottles to a major central processing plant where large volumes of glass bottles would be processed do not favorably justify the expense.
Attempts to have remote recycling locations have not met with as much success as would be desirable for several reasons. First, the cost of loading and unloading glass bottles from recycling locations inovlves a duplication of effort as glass products must be stored at the location, removed and transported to a final processing plant and then removed again from the transporting vehicle. Also, storage containers at the remote sites either need to be emptied relatively often or they are too large and unsightly or they are uneconomical to construct.
A major problem in handling small glass containers and other glass products at any recycling plant is the difficulty incurred in producing a clean product. There has not yet been a suitable method for separating the metal caps and neckbands that are present on various types of beverage bottles which employ the tamper proof twist caps without incurring a significant amount of hand labor. This, of course, is excessively expensive. Conventional machines such as hammermills are unsuitable for treating glass bottles because they crush the metal parts and glass together. Often times, plastic products are used as caps and other components of glass products, such as labeling and the like, and separating the glass is equally difficult. Both plastic and metal are objectional contaminants for glass which can be used in recycling plants.
It is a general object of this invention to provide a device which is suitable for pulverizing glass without the aforementioned difficulties of contamination by metal and/or plastic and which is suitable for transportation to remote collection sites for use at the collection sites to eliminate or substantially reduce transportation expenses. It is envisioned that a device of the type described herein, which would be useful for transporting to various remote sites, could be employed in some regular schedule or system for visiting a plurality of remote collection sites to thereby produce a pulverized glass product which is clean enough to be used in recycling plants.
Another object of the present invention is to provide a glass pulverizing apparatus which may be transported to various locations and which is capable of separating metal and/or plastic parts from the glass as it is being pulverized, so as to produce distinct and separate collected quantities of scrap metal, paper and other light weight contaminants and relatively pure crushed glass.